


Homework

by Maldoror_Chant



Series: Duty and Bloodshed: The CP9 Series [6]
Category: One Piece
Genre: CP9 - Freeform, M/M, Twisted sense of justice, Unreliable Narrator, somewhat tempered by time and a shift in politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 13:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12434133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maldoror_Chant/pseuds/Maldoror_Chant
Summary: There's new blood straight out of the Academy in the ranks of CP9. They're young, but they know it all, they're here to rise high in the ranks and to challenge the best. Naturally they are going to ace any evaluation assignment they're given. Even if they have to deal with that lame (literally!) Director Kaku to do so. Guy's a pen-pusher and a bit of a bore, but what can you do?They may no longer be in the Academy...but turns out, it's never too late to learn.





	Homework

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: Some 7 years after the water 7 arc in a somewhat peaceful post-series era where Luffy has become the pirate king.

The graduates to the ranks of the most exacting agency in Cipher Pol had expected the delivery address to be given by said agency's living legend. But Rob Lucci hadn't shown up to greet his soon-to-be-colleagues, and they'd been left with an anti-climatic 'welcome to CP9' talk by the director instead. 

"You've all graduated from the Academy with full marks in basic Rokushiki and law enforcement, congratulations," said the director with a genial smile, resting on his cane and addressing them like some proud grandfather. "The next few months will be focused on getting you all ready for the field. To start with, you'll be divided into two-member teams, as you would be on a mission. Then we've scheduled some in-house procedural seminars to acquaint you with the way we work in CP9. Once that's done, our field agents will provide you with some mentoring," the director finished, not noticing the glum 'great, more studying' aura percolating through the room. 

The director took on a pompous turn of phrase as he tapped his cane for attention. "As you know, CP9 has grown in size since its inception six years ago."

The graduates glanced at each other. 'Inception six years ago'...? Could it be possible this lame bore didn't know that this agency had been working in the shadows and the strictest secret for decades? This guy must be some figurehead administrator the government had slapped onto the agency. The real power would rest with the man who'd survived the great turmoil of the revolution and remained the iron claw within the republic's wooly mitten of peace and friendship. A few of the students discreetly glanced around to see if they could spot an ominous shadow observing them from a corner of the room. 

"We're now divided into three sections; Intel, Internal and Intervention," the director continued, oblivious to the drift of attention from his audience. They knew very well from rumors in the Academy halls that Intel was the section in charge of the boring prep work and background checks, Internal was guard duty and cleanup detail, and Intervention was made up of the strike teams doing the actual high-risk espionage and arrests. Only the best agents were selected for the latter. "You'll work with staff and mentors from each department during your final training, and you'll be eventually assigned to one of them according to your abilities. Do your best whichever section you're working with. You're probationary agents now, we expect you to conduct yourself as such. There are no exams to pass, you'll be happy to hear. Your trainers will give you an idea of when you're nearing the expected level. At the end of your tutorial period, you'll turn in a special assignment: a live demonstration of your abilities to get close to a subject and gather vital information. A friendly subject, someone in-house, don't worry, we won't drop you in at the deep end. That's all for now, your teachers will tell you more. My name is Director Kaku, my office is on the top floor of the New Tower and I do hope you'll come see me if you have any concerns. If I'm not available, my assistant will be happy to help you. Now, this is the head of our training team who'll divide you into units and give you your dorm keys and introductory folders."

The graduates were aged sixteen to eighteen, but chiefly they were divided into two categories at this point: the ones who unquestioningly lined up to get their timetables and homework from the scarred veteran teacher near the podium, and those graduates who paused, thought over what the director had said, and arrived at various stages of the following reasoning. 

They'd been told they were probationary CP9 agents - no longer students - and were meant to 'conduct themselves as such'. 

They would shed this probationary status when they handed in their special report. The director had given the impression the teachers would assign them their targets, but he'd not actually _said_ it. And while CP9's new charter was almost entirely above board, it was understood by the smarter students that a certain bending of the rules and a reading between the lines were still necessary.

Furthermore, the efficiency, pro-activeness and autonomy they showed in their approach to this special assignment would influence which section they'd eventually be assigned to.

So it wouldn't hurt, and in fact it was most likely expected, that they'd take the forefront, pick their targets themselves and start their assignment as soon as possible. If they chose a particularly challenging target and succeeded, they'd distinguish themselves from the other grads and make the Intervention section. And it so happened, they were going to be introduced to field agents for mentoring...you couldn't get much harder 'friendly' targets for a covert investigation than those. 

Only half a dozen of the twenty graduates had gotten this far in the reasoning. 

Only two went one step further to realize there was a more ambitious objective to acquire than one of CP9's foot soldiers, one which would be an obvious choice if this was a real-life mission and they were spying on an enemy organization. After all, why go for the hands when the head was a much better target? 

 

Those two ex-students were assigned together to make up Team number 10, as it happened. It probably wasn't a coincidence. Jake was sixteen, Maiamon was a year older and had been in a different class in the Academy, so they'd not had much contact previously. But they were both at the top of their respective groups and the person who wrote up the list of probationary agent units must have decided they'd work well together, or at least wouldn't slow each other down or kill each other before the first week was out. 

The first month of their new job was boring, an extension of their time at the Academy. Their tutors rabbited on about CP9's charter and legislation; about forms and reports to fill in; about watchdogs and civil liberties. The seminars could have been boiled down to ten minutes with a simplified version along the lines of, "CP9 is now a counter-espionage and anti-cartel unit for our government, so you can spy on enemies of the state, you can arrest them when judicially feasible, you can even gather blackmail material to pressure them into betraying their organizations if this is called for...but _no more assassination_ , unless, of course, you're in _certain circumstances_ that make it inevitable and you have enough of a paperwork umbrella to cover your sorry asses. Otherwise you're on your own." 

Jake and Mai had all the forms and procedures memorized by the second day, but they dutifully attended all the seminars and tried to look interested anyway. Working in the Intervention section wasn't always going to be about bloodshed and action, after all, it'd also involve stakeouts and undercover work, and Jake and Mai suspected their teachers were observing their class to see which of the candidates could stick to a tedious task without showing signs of impatience. (The Academy CP9 prep classes didn't actually have a course entitled Paranoia 101, but it was something that the more promising students picked up on their own anyway). 

The real work started every evening after classes, when most of the other students - those losers heading straight for the Intel and Internal sections - relaxed and blew off steam in the rec room. Team 10 spent their time in more fruitful pursuits, such as training as a two-man unit in the gym. It took longer than they'd anticipated to get into synch; teamwork didn't come naturally to teens who'd never cooperated with anyone before beyond the needs of the Cipher Pol Academy dodge ball competition (an event which, for the classes leading up to CP9, usually ended with at least one serious injury). They also had distinctive personalities and didn't like each other all that much, but that didn't matter a damn in the final analysis. They hadn't joined CP9 looking for a deep and loving friendship, which was good as the department seemed to be rather short on that. 

Once they got their act together, it was time to go after their prey.

"Are we really sure this asshole's worth our time?" Mai asked. He was the surly pessimist of the two (though Mai himself wouldn't put it that way), with a nasty, dangerous temper and a Rokushiki at the top of the chart for his age group. Jake sometimes wondered if they'd been teamed together for their mastery of the arts of combat, or if it was because Jake, who had a hide thicker than any tekkai, was the only one who'd put up with the foul-mouthed aggravating pain in the ass. "He's a dim bulb. They all say it's Corgi and the old guard of CP9 staff who really run the agency, this dude's just a government dick, a figurehead. Plus he's lame. I mean, the guy can barely walk."

"True, but he's the head of CP9. It stands to reason he'll be surrounded with all the security and secrecy of the other agents and then some," said Jake without bothering to say 'it was your idea to target him from the start, same as me, so stop being so negative'. 

"Team 9 are going after Hamura for their assignment. She's been an agent for five years now, and they say she's got over 1500 douriki."

"Sounds challenging," said Jake, because nothing annoyed Mai more than someone agreeing with him when he wanted to be contradicted. 

Unfortunately after a month of working together, Mai - who was far from dumb whatever his personality flaws - had Jake figured out in much the same way Jake had him down. He gave his partner a truculent look, but put aside the roughed-out list of agents that their spying had determined were the targets of the other probationary teams. It made no doubt in either of their mind that the other graduates were their rivals. There wasn't any actual competition for spots in Intervention, but both Jake and Mai took it as a matter of course that if they were going to make the unit, they'd make it as the best. They hoped Director Kaku, for all he was unimpressive in himself, would give them the opportunity to score over the others. There was only one other target that should surpass him in difficulty, but to their knowledge none of the other teams had set their sights on Rob Lucci. The fact that he was frequently away on missions was only part of the reason. Their pre-CP9 academy classes had taught them to take risks and bleed for the cause, but had stopped short of making them foolhardy.

"Okay, let's do it," Mai grunted, selecting a paper from the folder they kept hidden in this unused room in the probationary agent's dorm. "Here, I'll fill it in, I can't read your writing for crap."

"That has its advantages, you know."

"Not if we're working together, numbnuts. Dobernecky step ten encryption, okay?"

"That's even more illegible than my handwriting. Why are we taking these precautions?" Jake moved to the dusty window seat. He had to duck beneath the web an industrious spider had stretched across the empty room. "The others don't seem to care what anyone else is up to."

"That's because they're sheep-headed morons, but that'll change once they see which way the wind's blowing. You want some asswipe poaching our data and turning it in before we do?"

"Fine, Dobernecky 10 it is."

"Okay. Target acquired: Director Kaku." The scribble of pencil paused. "Do we know his first name?"

"Nope."

"We'll find it out."

"No we won't."

Mai frowned up at him. "What?"

Jake twirled his butterfly knife around an index finger, a habit from his past that he didn't care enough about other's opinions to discard. "I did some preliminary research."

The pencil end snapped off against the paper. "Alone?" Mai asked dangerously.

"Call it initiative. It was just archive browsing."

"Oh." Mai looked mollified. Jake had guessed his partner would find that part particularly unattractive since it didn't involve anything physical. "You didn't find anything?"

"Quite the contrary. I found a beautiful paper trail. It was lovely. His folder included a copy of his birth certificate, the names and addresses of his three sisters, his average-to-high grades throughout the civil servant prep school, the fact that he'd had measles age fifteen, and his favorite color is apparently teal. Very complete. It took quite a bit of extra research to prove the whole thing was bogus. Other than that bureaucratic fabrication, our genial director-cum-headmaster, who's working in the office five floors above our head at this very moment, does not exist."

Mai was silent for a minute. His thin eyes were permanently narrowed in an aggressive slant even when he was just thinking, which made him hard to read, but Jake could imagine the wheels turning. 

"That's interesting."

"That's very interesting," concurred Jake.

"That kinda makes me wonder if he's really the wooly-headed bleeding heart he looks to be."

"I had my doubts about that from the start."

"It also makes me wonder why you didn't tell me this days ago," Mai grated out.

"I thought you'd be offended if I assumed you couldn't figure it out on your own," Jake answered pleasantly. 

Score.

The pencil lost another inch, but Mai didn't say anything, just sharpened it with his fingers (a little application of Shigan that had been useful in written exams before now) and put the lead back to the paper again.

"We'll dig deeper. He's got to be in the paper mountain somewhere. He's the bloody director of CP9, he hobnobs with every senior civil servant from here to Mariejoie, he can't be a big fuckin' unknown. Tomorrow, we're going back to Archives. We'll talk to the staff, too, the few who've been here more than a couple of years. They're pretty damn closed-mouth about the bastard, but I'm sure we can sweat some details out of 'em if we work at it. Let's fill in what we can of this bloody form for now. At least we have his address, right?"

"Oh, sure, we know that much."

But as it turned out, they didn't. 

 

When he wasn't away at Mariejoie or in meetings, Director Kaku worked in his office day in and day out, eating lunch and dinner at his desk more often than not, until he hobbled home at around nine every evening, taking the time to talk to the agents, staff and graduates he met to see how they were doing. Everybody knew where he lived; the director's mansion was an elegant six-room building near a small park at one end of the island sheltering the new Cipher Pol center of operations as well as the Marines HQ and the entrance to Impel Down. Jake and Mai had seen their director push open the door to his luxurious digs, the lights turn on in a succession of rooms and then, after a couple of hours, turn off again.

But the lights were on a timer. When Team 10 finally broke into the place, with due precautions, their director was nowhere to be found. The tiny signs they had to collect to figure out that nobody actually lived there at all, despite clever dissemblance, was an education in information gathering in and of itself.

So the next step was to trail the sneaky bastard, a job made highly interesting by regular patrols of Marines as well as the more dangerous unpredictable sweeps by CP9's Internal section. 

After a truly hairy couple of weeks, Team 10 finally hit paydirt in the shape of a building lost in a corner of the park, stuck between a fortification and the plunge from the island down the eternal waterfall to the depths of Impel Down; a building which didn't exist in any blueprints of Marines HQ they could find. 

It wasn't large, the size of a small hotel; three floors, eight large individual suites in all. They hadn't actually tracked their director there; night after night, when Kaku slipped out the back door of his inhabited mansion, the two probationary agents had trailed him closely, yet they always lost him in the park sooner or later despite his hobbling gait. It was while they were quartering the woods, trying to pick up his tracks again, that they'd stumbled onto the building. Unless CP9's director slept up a tree, this had to be his nightly destination. This wasn't some out-of-the-way guardhouse or dorm, either; the first night they stumbled onto it, they barely managed to dodge out of sight when the front door opened and a man in his late thirties had stomped out, as scarred as their tutors yet with something in his attitude and swagger that suggested he was considerably more dangerous. Team 10 had never seen him before, and they'd made a point of researching all CP9 agents living and dead. All _known_ agents.

Jake had thoughtfully mentioned that though they'd seen Rob Lucci in the lunchroom or the gym a few times, they didn't know where _he_ lived either...At which point they proceeded with extreme caution. Their mission had just been upgraded from 'Tough' to 'Suicidal', but at least they were shoo-ins for the Intervention Team if they could ace it without getting caught.

The building and its attendant courtyard were delimited by the fortified wall on one of its sides, nearest the cliff. Once Team 10 had timed and charted out the patrols whose routes took them near it, the fortification made an adequate hunting bluff. They spent a week of evenings hidden behind crenellations, hanging from cornices and lurking near the gate, staking out the edifice from various angles. Tonight, they were ready.

They'd picked a clear day followed by a dry, crisp twilight. They were in their hiding places two hours before Kaku would even leave the office, and they waited there in silence with only the rustle of leaves from the nearby park, insect calls as the sun went down and the nearby rooo-rooooo of some bird greeting nightfall.

The sound of a gate swinging open and shut was ample reward for their patience. 

Below them, Director Kaku entered the courtyard and headed for the door, eyes on the dossier open in his hand, cane doing a rhythmic tak-tak-tak on the cobblestones. 

"Motherfucker," whispered Mai in tones of steely satisfaction.

"Finally," Jake concurred with a sigh. 

A few minutes later, the light on the second story room came on. It was the one with the large balcony breaking the building's dour lines along one corner. Jake and Mai had gambled that this additional feature would belong to the director and they'd positioned themselves on the courtyard wall opposite. They now had a great view into the room, which was a serviceable bedroom and kitchenette suite, if nowhere near as splendid as the unused quarters in the director's mansion.

Kaku strode in, dropping his cane in an umbrella stand near the door. He moved with a pronounced limp, but Jake wasn't all that surprised by now to note that his director didn't really need that cane to get around. That'd be the first line of the report; the director is in no way as lame as he tries to make out to be. The second line would go on to his sleeping arrangements, which spoke of considerable paranoia even for the head of an organisation dedicated to persecuting rival spy agencies, crime syndicates and enemies of the state. 

With a click that sounded clear across the courtyard in the silent evening air, Kaku opened the balcony window and leaned against the railing for a couple of minutes, enjoying a moment of relaxation while he idly tugged off his cravat. His features, unguarded, were a lot less woolly-headed and amiable than they ordinarily were...

He slipped his jacket off and went back into the room, leaving the balcony door open, a fact noted by the two probationary agents watching him. If that was a habit, they'd be able to get into the room all the easier and make away with proof of their infiltration. 

The jacket and vest landed on the back of a chair. The director paused with his shirt half unbuttoned and went to examine a suitcase open on the bed. The suitcase intrigued Jake, since his careful spying on the director's schedule hadn't shown any trips planned in the near future. The suitcase seemed to intrigue Kaku as well; he riffled through the contents and then looked around as if searching for something. Then with a shrug he slipped out of the shirt.

Next to Jake, Mai made a sort of inverted hiss. 

"Those are some scars," Jake murmured, examining his director's chest.

"Those are some muscles," Mai bit back, keeping his voice low. 

Mai had the ability to go straight to the point and stick to it. The scars striping their target's chest and abdomen could have conceivably been the result of some accident, they didn't signify much, but the tough frame, whip-lean musculature and broad shoulders, usually hidden beneath the overly baggy and out-of-fashion suit the director favoured, did not belong to a desk jockey, that was sure. 

They got snatches of view as Kaku moved back and forth between bed, chair and dresser, getting changed ('briefs', noted Jake automatically, even though there was no box on the Target Assessment form for that). A minute later, the light turned off. 

Mai breathed out. "Going out to dinner?" he grunted.

"No, he had sandwiches earlier."

"...How the hell do you always know this shit?"

"Two ham and tomato, and one with that avocado mix he likes," Jake added, having buttered up the kitchen staff on his second day at Cipher Pol HQ.

They both jumped as a rattle, thunderous in the silence, rolled across the courtyard. Kaku was down at ground level, lifting the metal door to what looked like a garage. Light shone out in big squares. The whole bottom floor of the house was a gym by the looks of it. Tatami extended into the courtyard for extra space.

Kaku was now dressed in a black tracksuit that made him look considerably different from their usual director. He stretched luxuriously and then without a sign of warning fell straight forward, landing on his hands, and started doing push-ups as easily as one took a stroll. 

"Hmf," said Mai, sounding like he felt obscurely challenged. 

"I just wish we knew who he really is," muttered Jake. They'd still drawn a blank in the files.

Kaku had done twenty reps, and Jake was about to add something, when he spotted the bottom edge of a door near the back of the room swing open to a waft of steam. Jake craned his neck. The angle of their surveillance post gave them a good view into their director's room but curtailed that of the private gym. 

A few yards away from the pair, the bird which had been making the occasional chirrup noise took to the air in a clap of wings, giving Jake cold sweats. It tumbled more than flew down to the courtyard, pulled up a few inches from the cobbles and fluttered straight into the gym and out of sight.

Intuition turned Jake's cold sweat to ice. 

A figure moved forward in the crude square of light projected by the gym's neons, barefooted, in total silence. Dressed only in black pants, with a towel around his neck and the elderly pigeon now sitting on his bare shoulder. It was the last person Team 10 wanted to see at this juncture.

Rob Lucci stood at the frontier between light and dark, looking out at the courtyard around him. Jake and Mai hunched down in the shadow of their parapet and thought very small thoughts. That this was a residence for high-level CP9 agents - a level beyond Intervention section that hardly anyone in the agency even knew about - had been a possibility. That Lucci would live here had been a theoretical likelihood. To have him look out into the night that was the only thing hiding a couple of spies was an entirely different proposition.

Lucci ran the towel over the hair hanging down his back in wet locks, taking care not to unbalance the pigeon which had dozed off. Then he slowly turned his head to where the director continued to do his pushups, fifteen feet away with his back to the new arrival. He didn't call out, though. He just watched. 

The moment stretched out slowly like a noose, and still he didn't say anything. 

Finally, deep in that total silence, Lucci moved forward, angling to stay in Kaku's blind side. There was a dark intent in the wordlessness of his approach. The closer he got, the more Jake's fingers tightened on the stone of the parapet. He'd never seen these two interact before, but there were rumours of tension between them. Lucci was a legend for his stark justice, and Kaku was the government appointed admin in charge of tempering just that. Jake had imagined a good deal of glacial civility and grudging obedience, but this slow stalking advance looked way more menacing. But surely- Kaku was the man's _boss_ -

Kaku, oblivious, continued to do his pressups while one of the most dangerous men on the Grand Line looked down on him. His rhythm was brisk, up, down, up, down-

Without a word, Lucci lifted one bare foot and put it down right between Kaku's shoulder blades. 

Grit bit into Jake's palm, scoring the skin.

Kaku didn't move. Didn't say anything. Didn't even look up. He stayed there, arms rock solid keeping him two inches from the ground. And then, more slowly this time, he pushed up. And down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

The twisted smile on Lucci's face as he looked down at the man beneath him was not an expression that Jake could interpret. 

Up. Down. Up. Down.

From the angle of Lucci's body, he was putting more weight onto Kaku's upper back. 

Kaku's breathing, harsher now, was the only sound in the courtyard; Jake had stopped doing _that_ a few minutes ago.

Up...down...up...down...up...down...up...down...

Jake heard Mai's lips move without a sound, and knew, without having to look, that it was Mai's favourite "Mother _fucker_." He must have just noticed, like Jake, that Kaku was not resting his palms on the ground but was holding himself up on his splayed fingers gripping down on concrete against the growing pressure. Jake numbly recognized a training exercise for Shigan. Kaku had been doing it for over five minutes now. On a good day and without someone standing on his back, Jake could manage three.

Up...down...Up...

Lucci's eyes gleamed as he _shoved_. 

Kaku's arms shook and buckled. He landed on the ground with an 'oof', followed by a coughed word favoured by pirate gangs and sailors which Jake hadn't thought his well-mannered director even knew, much less employed. Lucci smiled in feral amusement as Kaku rolled over.

"Didn't you have some packing to do?" Kaku groused, standing up stiffly and dusting down his front. 

"They pushed back our departure. I have another three hours. Are you doing your routine now?"

"No, I just came down for a short warmup with a little assault on the side. Why?"

They moved towards the house side by side as they spoke. The next words were muffled by the loom of the building; Jake thought he caught 'last-minute information' and 'back by Sunday'. Side by side, their director, whom Jake had always thought of as gangly, was as tall as Lucci and just as wide in the shoulders. Lucci's bare back bore the scars they'd all heard about; Kaku's were hidden beneath his tracksuit.

A minute later the light in the room came on, and Jake did the maths, adding the words 'don't you have some packing to do' to the suitcase on the bed, the sort of equation that would give anyone the heebie-jeebies.

"What?" Mai asked, a breath more than a word, when Jake's forehead thudded softly against the stone parapet.

"We need to leave now," Jake mouthed at him. 

"Dangerous." Mai gave the balcony across the forty-foot courtyard a meaningful glance. Lucci might spot movement where it wasn't expected and Geppou would get him over to the wall in two murderous seconds.

"Um..."

In the room, the pigeon was now dozing on a perch obviously intended for that purpose. Kaku had picked up the folder he'd been reading before, sitting down on the edge of the bed to go through it. Lucci, coming back from the bathroom, dropped a toilet kit into the suitcase. 

Mai's brow furrowed slowly. "Wait, whose room-...uh..."

"Now you get it."

Lucci tossed a couple of ties next to the kit, but his eyes were on Kaku. 

"We need to get out of here."

"That's what I said-"

Then Lucci stepped over to his director, ripped the folder out of his hands - Kaku's "Hey!" rang like a shot through the courtyard - grabbed Kaku by the front of the tracksuit and hauled him to his feet and into a kiss.

Mai breathed out through his nose. He was assiduously looking at his shoes. Jake was just as assiduously looking at Mai, though his eyes darted back of their own volition when something thudded in the room beyond the open window and bedsprings shrieked. 

The suitcase and contents were on the floor. Kaku's hands were gripping Lucci's bare shoulders hard enough to leave red prints visible clear across the courtyard, locking him into place rather than pushing him away, while Lucci was grinding him into the bed with the kind of naked force he'd exerted earlier in the courtyard. The noise had woken the pigeon, which arthritically flapped its wings a couple of times, huffed, then ponderously turned its back on the proceedings and went back to sleep as far as Jake could tell. 

Just as suddenly as he'd assaulted him, Lucci tore himself away from the other man and stood up. There was that smile again as he looked down, the expression Jake suspected he was still a bit too young and comparatively naïve to understand. Then Lucci turned away. Kaku made a sort of "wha-" noise in the background, staring at Lucci's bare back, but the other man didn't say anything. He strode to the open window and stood there, staring out into the night. He wasn't looking at anything in particular. That in itself wasn't right, of course. 

Then he reached up and drew the curtain shut with one sharp gesture.

Jake and Mai cowered behind the parapet and wondered how long it would take them to dare move, knowing they really did have to move very, very soon. 

 

Team 10 turned in their Special Assignment in the director's office two weeks later. They respectfully requested to do so in private. The director asked his secretary to leave with not a moment's hesitation. Then he listened to the report without ever losing that attentive expression he always had, not even when Jake got to the section on Target's Relations followed by the paragraph on Possible Points of Pressure, a bureaucratic way of saying 'avenues to blackmail the tar out of the victim'. In this instance, the suggestions started with a murky, blood-ridden past that was bound to clash with the new Republic's peaceful image, and ended with a present day liaison with a subordinate that would be frowned upon by Cipher Pol Internal Affairs, assuming they'd have the gall to stick their nose into it. 

Jake's voice was the only sound in the office apart from the tic of the wall clock. He fought tooth and nail to keep his tone neutral, even though it was obvious by now the man they faced was a consummate dissembler and Team 10 wouldn't be able to tell if he was planning to praise the pair after the report or have them shot.

In the event, he did neither. He passed them. With full marks, straight to Intervention Section as a team earmarked for high-priority jobs, along with an amicable comment about initiative that boiled down to 'good work, but be careful how much leeway you take with my orders when you're out in the field'. 

Jake suspected that this feeling of undiluted victory mixed with anticipation for the next challenge was what he'd feel on each successful mission from now on. It made the salary that would now be paid into his bank account pretty much irrelevant. 

"Stop by my secretary's desk and give him your IDs, he'll get the paperwork started. Then I want you to report to your new tutor. It will take a couple of weeks to get your status upgraded, we'll take advantage of that."

Jake's euphoria dissolved like a body in an acid bath.

"Who's the new tutor?" Mai asked. From the edge of foreboding lining his question, he already knew the answer. 

"He's more of a special trainer, just to round off your education and get you fully ready for the field and advanced missions. He's waiting for you down in the gym." 'Waiting for you', Jake noted; it suggested both the director and the 'special trainer' knew the team was turning in that report today and would probably pass. "Be sure to give him a copy of your work for evaluation," the director added, eyes crinkling in amusement as he reread one of the sections. 

Team 10 said 'Yes sir', since there really wasn't much else to say and 'Mercy' was unlikely to cut it. The firing squad might have been the better option.

"It's the price of excellence and ambition," said the director cheerfully, handing the document back to Jake. "Dismissed."


End file.
